Telefónica Germany has announced it is moving forward with its planned expansion of the telco-owned e-commerce payment scheme mpass to the physical point of sale, but has apparently dropped plans to introduce its own brand.
Telefónica said it would launch contactless stickers that customers could affix to the back of the mobile phones to pay for purchases at stores, a move seen as a prelude to putting the application onto SIM cards in NFC mobile phones.
But the passive stickers will sport not only the mpass brand but also the MasterCard PayPass acceptance mark, which would mean Telefónica and its partners in the mpass consortium, Vodafone Germany and Deutsche Telekom, have apparently scrapped plans to introduce their own payment brand at the physical point of sale–an initiative that would have required them to sign up their own merchants.
